Oscar De La Hoya never said it would be easy. He simply said he would do it. And Saturday morning, he did. He won a gold medal for his mother, who, he later said, saw it all. And during the medal ceremony, he almost cried, but didn't. The graceful, hard-punching lightweight from the Brooklyn Gym in Boyle Heights managed to pull his exhausted, emotionally spent East Los Angeles cheering section along one more bumpy Olympian road of peaks and valleys Saturday morning.

Creating heroes before their time is risky business, but that hasn't stopped a shoe company from making "Dan and Dave" household names before the first starter's shot has been fired this summer in Barcelona. A bit presumptuous? Hey, when the competition has Michael Jordan under contract, you'd better think fast on your feet.

With only hours to go before NBC and Cablevision Systems Co. launch their Olympics TripleCast event, the partners are dramatically short of their subscriber goals. As a result, NBC stands to lose more than $100 million. A random survey of cable systems shows that NBC has not significantly added to the 60,000 subscribers that it announced had purchased the TripleCast as of 10 days ago. That is only 2.4% of the total audience NBC projected it needed to break even.

The sleekly efficient Reebok marketing machine, which brought us the Dan & Dave Show, coughed and sputtered briefly Saturday at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials. Half of its engine, world champion decathlete Dan O'Brien, pulled over and broke down in the pole vault. "Dan-Dave. Who is the world's greatest athlete? To be settled in Barcelona." Suddenly, a six-month, $25-million advertising campaign had lost its premise.

June 14, 1992 | JOSEPH GIOVANNINI, Joseph Giovannini is an architect and author based in New York City.

WHEN BARCELONA WAS OFFIcially declared the host of the 1992 Olympic Games in Lausanne, Switzerland, on an afternoon in October, 1986, grown politicians cried. Since the 1920s, Barcelona had tried for the Games three times, even attempting a counter-Olympics in 1936 to protest Hitler's Games in Berlin. This time Mayor Pasqual Maragall and other officials returned triumphantly to an airport jammed with exultant citizens and rode into Barcelona in a midnight cavalcade of honking cars.

Ted Knapp, Stanford's assistant swimming coach, seemed to be asking for everyone when he sidled up to a deGuerre pool maintenance man recently and asked: "What are you putting in the water?" What indeed? What mysterious compound enabled Stanford and coaches Richard Quick and Skip Kenney to win the women's and men's NCAA championships and place Summer Sanders, Jeff Rouse, Jenny Thompson, Lea Loveless, Pablo Morales and Angie Wester-Krieg on the U.S. Olympic team?

Inside a small office in a deserted gym outside St. Petersburg, Russia, Vladimir Kondrashin has built a shrine to Alexander Belov, who scored the winning points in the Soviet Union's historic victory over the United States in the championship game of the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich. Medals and pictures surround a letter of condolence from International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch, Spain's ambassador to the Soviet Union when Belov died in 1978.

What could Bela Karolyi possibly have left to tell Kim Zmeskal? He already spends seven hours a day with her, six days a week, and has been coaching her for nine years. But while she is competing, he is as intense as ever--motioning to her, head bobbing, arms flying. She stares up at him even more intensely--nodding, her ponytail bouncing. This, after she has scored a 10 on the vault. "Well, I'm not perfect yet--I need more correction," Zmeskal said.

This year's Summer Olympics may be remembered not only for demonstrations of athletic prowess, but also for the hurdles that Nike and Reebok surmounted as they peddled their sportswear from Barcelona. The footwear giants launched multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns, hoping to win the gold medal with consumers. Yet their quests for global recognition, like that of some Olympic athletes, encountered numerous challenges.

OK, so she's not Mary Lou Retton. She doesn't sparkle while tumbling. She doesn't smile on cue. She doesn't leap into the arms of a coach. All Shannon Miller does is pile up medals in the Summer Olympics. Saturday night, the 4-foot-9, 73-pound gymnast who wears heart-shaped diamond earrings and performs with a grimace on her face, won a silver and two bronzes in the women's individual apparatus.